17. The Devotional Engine
The Devotional Engine
Girl Genius
FR-C
The Devotional Engine was the final straw.
Up until then, it had been a fairly even fight. The vampires were physically and mentally superior to even the greatest of Sparks, but they lacked the sheer inventiveness that produced weapons such as the auto-staker and the flame bellows. The Sparks, meanwhile, had a hundred weapons, but their own opposition to formalised religious practice had robbed them of one of the most powerful.
Rigorous experimentation had shown that no amount of candlestick drill or finger exercises would allow a soldier indoctrinated in the - for want of a better word - rational methods of the brave new world to replicate the repulsive properties which faith possessed against vampires. Neither would any number of wax cylinder recordings of the necessary rites and scriptural recitations allow a mechanical pump to provide a steady stream of holy water and even mass-produced crosses proved remarkably ineffective.
And then Abraham Van Heterodyne - a minor scion of that infamous dynasty - shamed first his family by taking holy orders and then his order by constructing the Devotional Engine (also known as the Theolomatic Paracausal Energy Generator). An early work of artificial intelligence, it was in many ways crude even by the standards of its time, but that was a design feature.
Sophisticated enough to choose, but programmed with a series of facts designed to reach a single, ineluctable conclusion and fundamentally too dense ever to apply new information and question its assumptions, it did one thing and it did it well: It believed in God with an unshakable faith.
Armed with the Devotional Engine, Van Heterodyne armed a band of 'gentlemen' with more blessed weapons than the world had ever known and cut a swathe through the heart of vampire country, opening up Transylvania to the rule of Polygnostic rationalism that followed and effectively destroying the vampires as anything more than an occasional pest and bringing an end to the era of the Vampire Wars.
As a happy side effect, by essentially mechanising faith the Devotional Engine struck a mortal blow from which the forces of organised religion never truly recovered, as great houses and civic authorities across Europe chose to replace their churches and priests via the purchase and light maintenance of a Devotional Engine which would attend to the spiritual health of the body politic without all those niggling demands for tithes, roof repairs and jumble sales. The Devotional Engine allowed for a uniform faith which provided all of the advantages of religion without the drawbacks of dogma, arbitrary moral codes and self-righteousness.
For our next class, please read Chapter 37 of your text books: The Causes and Beginning of the First Theolomatic Crusades.
Girl Genius
FR-C
The Devotional Engine was the final straw.
Up until then, it had been a fairly even fight. The vampires were physically and mentally superior to even the greatest of Sparks, but they lacked the sheer inventiveness that produced weapons such as the auto-staker and the flame bellows. The Sparks, meanwhile, had a hundred weapons, but their own opposition to formalised religious practice had robbed them of one of the most powerful.
Rigorous experimentation had shown that no amount of candlestick drill or finger exercises would allow a soldier indoctrinated in the - for want of a better word - rational methods of the brave new world to replicate the repulsive properties which faith possessed against vampires. Neither would any number of wax cylinder recordings of the necessary rites and scriptural recitations allow a mechanical pump to provide a steady stream of holy water and even mass-produced crosses proved remarkably ineffective.
And then Abraham Van Heterodyne - a minor scion of that infamous dynasty - shamed first his family by taking holy orders and then his order by constructing the Devotional Engine (also known as the Theolomatic Paracausal Energy Generator). An early work of artificial intelligence, it was in many ways crude even by the standards of its time, but that was a design feature.
Sophisticated enough to choose, but programmed with a series of facts designed to reach a single, ineluctable conclusion and fundamentally too dense ever to apply new information and question its assumptions, it did one thing and it did it well: It believed in God with an unshakable faith.
Armed with the Devotional Engine, Van Heterodyne armed a band of 'gentlemen' with more blessed weapons than the world had ever known and cut a swathe through the heart of vampire country, opening up Transylvania to the rule of Polygnostic rationalism that followed and effectively destroying the vampires as anything more than an occasional pest and bringing an end to the era of the Vampire Wars.
As a happy side effect, by essentially mechanising faith the Devotional Engine struck a mortal blow from which the forces of organised religion never truly recovered, as great houses and civic authorities across Europe chose to replace their churches and priests via the purchase and light maintenance of a Devotional Engine which would attend to the spiritual health of the body politic without all those niggling demands for tithes, roof repairs and jumble sales. The Devotional Engine allowed for a uniform faith which provided all of the advantages of religion without the drawbacks of dogma, arbitrary moral codes and self-righteousness.
For our next class, please read Chapter 37 of your text books: The Causes and Beginning of the First Theolomatic Crusades.